Retired Americans turn to subletting houses and boats

But wait, I thought they were supposed to be giving loans to their kids so the kids could take risks, no? Isn't that with Romney said they should do? After taking a thrashing during the last few recessions retired Americans are hardly in any financial condition to throw money around the way Romney has suggested. CNBC:

The two enterprising couples are part of an emerging wave of retired “micropreneurs,” who pay for some of their living expenses by renting, sharing or swapping their big-ticket assets, such as homes, cars, airplanes and boats. New online companies are making it easier, safer and more efficient for you to become a tiny rental agency. Both couples attract at least a third of their guests through Airbnb, a San Francisco-based global online marketplace for privately owned homes and rooms. Its online rivals include Roomorama and Vacation Rentals by Owner. For autos, online car-sharing services like Relay Rides enable you to make money by renting your underused vehicles. If you have a boat or a private plane that you are willing to share, ShareZen offers you software and online assistance.

The idea of the "sharing economy" is a great thing in my opinion as it helps eliminate waste and helps generate money for many people, but there's still a large delta between the sharing economy and the Mitt Romney world, where everyone around you is dripping in money and making $10,000 bets and building elevators for their fleet of cars. Read the rest of this post...

Wisconsin recall—Gov. Scott Walker raised $13 million since January (no other Dem comes close)

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal (h/t The Political Carnival):

Gov. Scott Walker raised an unprecedented $13.2 million over three months to fight off the recall bid against him, outdistancing his Democratic challengers and driving home the challenge they will have in beating the Republican incumbent.

Crisscrossing the country on fundraising trips, Walker has raised more than $25 million since January 2011 and has $4.9 million in cash on hand - numbers unlike any that have been seen for a political candidate in Wisconsin. Two-thirds of Walker's money came from out of state.

His stores of cash dwarf what his Democratic rivals have raised. ... Walker's fundraising is on par with that of second-tier presidential candidates. For instance, Rick Santorum raised $18.5 million between Jan. 1 and March 31, and Newt Gingrich raised a little less than $10 million during that period.

There's a nice chart of comparative fund-raising at the link. Here's another.

Part of the inequity is the obvious — Walker is Money's man in the race, and Money has money to spare. But there's a trick in the law around recalls — if you're a recallee, there's a no-limit window for you. If you're a recaller, however, normal limits apply:

Normally, donors can give a maximum of $10,000 to a candidate for governor. But from the time recall petitions are taken out to the time a recall election is called, donors can give any amount.

No fundraising limit was in place for Walker for about two-thirds of the period covered in the latest report. The Democrats had to follow the normal fundraising limits the whole time because they were not the targets of a recall.

I don't blame Republicans for using a law like that — I sure would — but it's some law.

Finally, we don't want to leave without mentioned this sweet guy amongst the high-roller donors listed in the article:

In addition to the $500,000 donation from Hendricks, Walker received two $250,000 donations in the latest period. One came from Las Vegas Sands president Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino mogul who, along with his wife, put $17.5 million into Winning the Future, a super PAC supporting Gingrich.

Also giving $250,000 was Richard DeVos, the co-founder of the parent company of direct marketing firm Amway. DeVos has been active in the school voucher movement, and Walker last year expanded Milwaukee's voucher program and established a similar one in eastern Racine County.

Adelson? He's this guy (and you really do want to click; Rick Perlstein at his researching and writing best).

Oh, and school reform is not your friend, which is why DeVos is Walker's. It's a Movement Conservative Ball, a Monster Mash.

Dates to remember:

• May 8: Recall primary
• June 5: Recall election

More on Wisconsin as it develops. Read the rest of this post...

Was Ronald Reagan a Marxist?

Republicans are freaking out because the Obama campaign is using the word 'forward' in its ads, and apparently the far right Republicans controlling the GOP are convinced that only marxists use the word "forward."

You know who else used the word "forward" in a presidential campaign ad? Ronald Reagan. Full text of the famous Reagan ad:

"It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

Try morning in Moscow. Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post: Gay Romney spokesman "hounded from Romney campaign by anti-gay conservatives"

UPDATE: Per Jennifer Ruben at the Washington Post, Romney threw the gay spokesman to the sharks:

During the two weeks after Grenell’s hiring was announced the Romney campaign did not put Grenell out to comment on national security matters and did not use him on a press foreign policy conference call. Despite the controversy in new media and in conservative circles, there was no public statement of support for Grenell by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.

Wow. From the Washington Post's conservative blogger, Jennifer Ruben:

Richard Grenell hounded from Romney campaign by anti-gay conservatives
By Jennifer Rubin

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

Pieces in two conservative publications, the National Review and Daily Caller, reflected the uproar by some social conservatives over the appointment. [UPDATE, 4:30 p.m.: Although Grenell also raised the ire of liberal commentators with now-deleted tweets about certain prominent women, none of the sources I spoke with mentioned the tweets as a factor in his resignation decision.]

Read the rest of this post...

Obama campaign highlighting the First Pet to embarrass Romney

And they should. While it might look petty, it says something about a man, the way he trust the most vulnerable among us (so the saying goes). I remember my uncle, who was Greece's UN ambassador at the time, telling me that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats animals. And I think it's very true. Watch someone interacting with a child, or a pet - especially one they meet for the first time. It speaks volumes. Read the rest of this post...

Romney plays to nation's racial subconscious

Presidential politics is an increasingly exact science. Words are carefully chosen, poll-tested and fine-tuned before being used, and every catchphrase, slogan and sound bite is designed to maximize the campaign's appeal to their target audience.

This appeal takes place on two different levels- one conscious and one subconscious. While the term "subconscious" alludes to subliminal advertising, it generally only means appealing to implicit attitudes that are not consciously processed (although subliminal ads have entered presidential campaigns before). The best way to think of the distinction between the two is to consider what a candidate says as a conscious appeal, but how the candidate says it, or the choice to say it in the first place, a subconscious appeal.

Following the 1980 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan launched his general election campaign with what have since become boilerplate GOP talking points. Here's an excerpt of what he said:

I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

On a conscious level, what Reagan said was fairly innocuous. But how did he say it? The speech was framed around Regan's "[belief] in states' rights," and was delivered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same place where three civil rights workers had been killed for attempting to register African-American voters.

The Reagan campaign chose the location under the advice of Strom Thurmond (who, ironically, was later found to have fathered an out-of-wedlock child with his African-American housekeeper), and used the frame and location of the speech to make an appeal to the "Dixiecrats" of the South. Jimmy Carter failed to call Reagan out for the implicit racial appeal, and Reagan went on to cream Carter, winning every Southern state which Carter had won in 1976, except for Georgia, Carter's home state.

Fast-forward to 2012.

Mitt Romney is the front-runner for the Republican nomination but has showed signs of weakness with rural voters, particularly in the South. Many Republican strategists are worried that Team Romney will not be able to generate enough enthusiasm to win crucial states such as North Carolina and Virginia. Moreover, the rhetoric necessary to generate such enthusiasm among the GOP base will likely alienate independents in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. How has the Romney campaign attempted to confront this dilemma? With a catchy, multi-faceted slogan:

The black guy "isn't working" - get it?

As Tommy Christopher of Mediaite notes:

When I first saw the banner...the multiple meanings were clear: President Obama's policies aren't working, the Obama presidency isn't working, President Obama...isn't working, as in, doing any work. That's not a nice thing to say about any president, but like it or not, it becomes a more loaded accusation when leveled at our first black president.

Subconscious appeals are called dog-whistles for a reason: Three different people can read the above phrase and get three very different messages. "Obama Isn't Working" has economic connotations for some and racial connotations for others. For the surprisingly high amount of Americans who hold implicit racial biases, the phrase also can trigger negative subconscious associations regarding President Obama based on the color of his skin, aka racism.

Because of the slogan's multiple meanings, the Romney campaign has plausible deniability when its racial component is brought up. However, given its history, the GOP has forfeited its right to the benefit of the doubt when it comes to race. Considering the level of scrutiny placed on every word used by a presidential candidate, and the emphasis Romney is placing on this new slogan (in addition to appearing on stage, it has its own website), I find it hard to believe that the racial connotations of "Obama Isn't Working" went unnoticed before the phrase was unveiled.

Moreover, considering the benefit Team Romney gains from being able to trigger implicit racial biases without getting taken to task for it on a conscious level, it is far more likely that the creation of the slogan was a deliberate play to America's dark, but very real, subconscious biases and prejudices based on race. Read the rest of this post...

Obama 2006—"Too many of us have been interested in defending programs as written in 1938"

Obama means the safety net programs, as the following speech makes clear.

This is Obama's 2006 speech at the launch of the Brooking Institute's "Hamilton Project" — a NeoLiberal "think tank" created by Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary, and former Treasury deputy secretary Roger Altman. Obama addresses them as "Bob" and "Roger" at the start.

As Politico put it in 2010:

The [Hamilton Project's] research, so far, would be familiar to students of the first Clinton administration: creative, wonky proposals for softening the impact of globalization without interfering with international trade, most of them crafted with an eye to fiscal austerity and a balanced budget.

The stuff of Clintonion NeoLiberal dreams.

On launch day, enter soon-to-be–presidential candidate Barack Obama to the Robert Rubin–Roger Altman chambers. Remember, Rubin and Altman were Bill Clinton Bigs. Obama felt very much at home in this chamber, with these ideas. Very one of them.

You could call this Obama's NeoLiberal Manifesto. Watch and see if I'm wrong. It's not long, it touches most of the bases, and tells you all you need to know about how Barack Obama would govern. (Points if you hear footsteps of 2013 as well.)



Notice his sense of talking with them as equals; he's not at all put off by the roomful of potential Hillary backers, not at all deferential.

A couple of pull-quotes:

"The forces of globalization have changed the rules of the game."

"The coming baby boomer retirement will only add to the challenges."

"Too many of us [on the left] have been interested in defending programs the way they were written in 1938[.]"

"Most of us are strong free-traders."

And that in just the first few minutes or so. Do listen to the end.

Four small notes from my perspective:

■ The minute he says "I think there is a broad consensus" [3:10] — he's selling, not describing. If you listen to what follows as a sales pitch trying to make a wish into a fact, he makes perfect sense.

This is the entire NeoLiberal lie — that these are not discretionary decisions about the future, but done-deal descriptions of the present or past.

■ At about 5:00, he talks about stealing ideas from those in the Project. Sounds like fair warning to me.

■ It also sounds like he knows he's going to run for president. Maybe that's just me, but listen to the tone. Can you hear the present president in this newly-hatched senator? I can.

■ Note the education point he makes at the end — it accepts the Clintonian lie, that we can somehow over-educate ourselves into what jobs are left behind. Think that through; it's patently absurd that a Master's degree will make you more competitive as you man the Fries-With-That Burgerville cash register.

Obama's quibble is that they should take that lie more seriously — by attempting to actually implement it. A nit, but his own. Everybody has one.

A tip of the hat to Tiny Revolution for the find; well done.

For more on what anyone with eyes could have seen about Obama in 2006, try this. If it weren't for a certain poster, and a certain soul-vid, we may have seen him differently. Or not.

Obama's NeoLiberal Manifesto, ladies and gentlemen; archived for your edification.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
  Read the rest of this post...

If Mitt Romney had his way, Osama bin Laden would still be alive

I'm paraphrasing George W. Bush.

The Republicans have a problem with President Obama taking credit for Osama bin Laden's death.  But they had no problem with George Bush taking credit for capturing Saddam, and on September 11 no less.

From USA Today on September 11 (no less) of 2004:

In a harsh new attack on rival John Kerry, President Bush said Friday that if the Democratic presidential candidate "had his way," Saddam Hussein's regime would be running Iraq and threatening the safety of other nations.

The newest wrinkle is that Sen. Kerry has now decided we are spending too much money in Iraq even though he criticized us earlier for not spending enough," Bush said. "One thing about Sen. Kerry's position is clear ... if he had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power and would still be a threat to our security and to the world."

As I pointed out in the earlier post, Mitt Romney didn't want us going into Pakistan to catch bin Laden, which is in fact where we got him. Good thing Mitt Romney didn't win the presidency in 2008 or Osama bin Laden still might be alive. Read the rest of this post...

BREAKING: UK parliamentary report finds Murdoch "unfit" to run a global company

This is happening now.  Live feed of the committee.  More to come. "Rupert Murdoch is not fit to run a multinational company."

BBC:

Rupert Murdoch "is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company", MPs have said. The cross-party culture committee questioned journalists and bosses at the now closed paper, as well as police and lawyers for hacking victims. It concluded that Mr Murdoch exhibited "wilful blindness" to what was going on in his media empire. And it said the News of the World and News International misled Parliament about the scale of phone hacking.

Why is the American press not looking into whether Fox and the WSJ were involved in this scandal as well? Three other Murdoch properties were. Reason enough to inquire whether the same thing happened at other Murdoch companies. Read the rest of this post...

New wind turbines produce water as well as energy

This is an interesting new addition that could solve a lot of problems in many parts of the world. It may not generate substantial water everywhere, but even if it's only for some regions this could make a big difference. Single purpose products seem so outdated. CNN:

"This technology could enable rural areas to become self-sufficient in terms of water supply," says Thibault Janin, director of marketing at Eole Water. "As the design and capabilities develop, the next step will be to create turbines that can provide water for small cities or areas with denser populations," he adds. Eole Water is currently displaying a working prototype of the 24 meter tall WMS1000 in the desert near Abu Dhabi that has been able to produce 62 liters of water an hour, says Janin.

Read the rest of this post...

Austerity-hit Spain also falls back into recession

The other day it was the UK falling back into recession and now Spain, another country that implemented harsh austerity. Anyone else seeing a trend here? More on the latest bad news for Spain from Reuters via CNBC:

Spain's economy slipped into recession in the first quarter as domestic demand shrank, data showed on Monday, with deep government spending cuts in an uphill battle to trim the public deficit likely to delay any return to growth. Gross domestic product shrank 0.3 percent in January-March from the previous quarter according to preliminary National Statistics Institute data, unchanged from October-December and compared to a Reuters poll expecting a 0.4 percent contraction.

Who will be the first country in the EU to tell the bankers to pound go pound salt? Read the rest of this post...